16 Weeks

We had another appointment at the birth center yesterday and all is well. Little baby's heart is beating away and my uterus is measuring spot on. My uterus is a star student. It always measured to the centimeter with Henry, too.

I also met a new midwife and talked to her about my diet. The birth center requires patients to record everything they eat for a week so they can review it. So different from my last pregnancy with an OB. The nurse there gave me a pamphlet about eating healthy at the beginning and then no one seemed to care that I gained 48 pounds by the end. At one point the nurse said, "Don't worry, it's all baby." And I said, "Thanks, but I'm pretty sure this baby isn't going to weigh 40 pounds." I was counting on losing the weight by breastfeeding, but based on an informal survey of moms I know, that only works for about half of women. I am not in the favorable half. So here I am pregnant again and starting a good bit heavier than I did with Henry. I am hoping to gain about half as much weight this time, and definitely to weigh no more at the end than I did with Henry. The midwife had positive things to say about my diet chart except that I should ditch my morning OJ, which I will probably ignore unless I fail my glucose test since it's such an easy way to get vitamin C (strengthens your amniotic sac to prevent premature rupture) and extra calcium.

I'm not sure I've talked about the birth center before. Husband and I have had a lot of discussion about where to have this baby (this actually started with the last pregnancy). I liked my OB practice well enough but as time has passed I am finding myself less than excited to go back. The office is so much busier, and while I love all the midwives and one of the OBs, I kind of hate the other one and most of the office staff. But mainly I am just not sure I want to birth at the hospital. I appreciate what OBs and hospitals do when circumstances require their expertise and technology, but it's honestly overkill for most normal births. For a variety of reasons I personally have no interest in a medicalized birth, including an epidural. That means I am automatically swimming upstream when I show up at the hospital. I was not quite comfortable with an out-of-hospital birth the first time, but now I am much more so.

We thought about home birth, and even found a very experienced midwife. But we just couldn't pull the trigger for a couple of reasons. One, it's about 20 minutes from our house to a major hospital in the case of transfer (the closest hospitals don't have 24/7 anesthesiology so they wouldn't work for an emergency cesarean). That's just too far for my personal comfort level, though people do home birth in the sticks all the time. Also my parents kind of freaked at the mention of a home birth and I'm sure Husband's parents would as well. I am really intrigued by the idea of a home birth but I'm not attached enough to deal with family drama for the duration of the pregnancy.

So we settled on the birth center. It is staffed by midwives, though a supervising OB reviews patient records and can consult in the case of a complication during pregnancy. It's within 5 minutes of the major hospital, which is close enough for me in the very unlikely event that we need to transfer. The rooms are so much nicer than a hospital, homey with a big deep jacuzzi tub. They are experts in normal birth, but have all the medical doo-dads necessary in case of emergency. They never take the baby away and we get to go home after 6-8 hours of observation. Their stats are amazing, and there is a very low likelihood that (as happened at my first birth) Gidget the 23 year old nurse who has never pushed anything out of her vagina will tell me, "You can either push or stay pregnant forever."* The downside is that I still have to ride in the car in labor and that I will get whoever is on call instead of my personal midwife like I would if I had a home birth. In some minds it's the worst of both worlds but I think it's the right choice for us.

I am feeling better overall, but I have never been so tired in my life. My pediatrician and my mom both agree that being pregnant with the second is more tiring than actually having another baby. I sure hope that's true. Between peeing 2-3 times a night, Husband snoring, and Henry waking up early I feel a bit like a Gitmo detainee being tortured. Also, I threw up yesterday for the first time in either pregnancy. WTF? I'm 16 weeks pregnant and I'm not even nauseous anymore. It was somewhere between a dry heave and actually vomiting, but not the way I wanted to start my morning. Apparently bending over to spit after I brush my teeth triggers a gag reflex now, so I have to stand tall and spit delicately from a great height. This bothers me more than other, more difficult aspects of pregnancy because seriously, WTF? Is brushing my teeth without barfing now considered a luxury?

Otherwise we are humming right along with the pregnancy. I think I am starting to feel the baby move a little bit here and there, which is very exciting. At the end of the month we have our 20 week appointment and ultrasound so we get to find out if it's a boy or a girl, and then we get to start fighting about names. Henry kinda sorta seems to understand that there is a baby in there. Mostly this is because I say, "No hurt the baby!" when he climbs on me. He pretty consistently says he wants a girl baby or "dister" but I'm not sure he knows what that means. He likes to put the balloons we get at HEB under his shirt, and yesterday I told him the umbilical cord was sticking out (the string) so he repeated "uhical code" for about an hour afterward. I am looking very forward to him holding and kissing the baby when he meets it, and then to hearing him say "bye bye baby" for many months thereafter.

*Yes, that really happened, no her name was not Gidget but that's what I call her, and for the record I pushed that baby out in 30 minutes without following any of her ridiculous instructions.